Years of Pilgrimage

a long poem by Tim Cloudsley

with border art by Mary Johnston

part 3

Stap

Flake I, doghead of blue,

Eating the pink crocodile,

He who minches and swats the lions,

Clipping the ears of every fool,

Juckatoo crimped with an empty spool,

Dogeared so fleet, he spat a pool,

His toe was doog, his flack monotoned,

Mind of his cloud, kwak-flipped a quad.

Stamp of the spack, she plopped a gok,

Stoop was the brain, breeting a koop,

Sopukatame dreeped a pog,

Nogatakeeta som pagaret!

Stapatakachi stop top-aboot,

Slinketta foodo ig jokabu,

Bleepacooto slack doodapip,

Stamperadiski pichudaradu!

Boot a pig!

Hog a boot?

Thus is the strange universe, no?

No custard? Why no gok adood it?

Patter the spatter of coolapoldi.

Stap!

Song Of Paraguay

Song of beauty

mmmmmmcmminto the night

Welcome foreigner

mmmmmmmmmmcinto our land

Our land of heroes

mmmmmmmmcmmwho fought valiently

Let us take you to our hearts

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmthat you will learn Guaraní!

Our women are beautiful

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmthough we are poor

Be a friend to us stranger

mmmmmmmcmmmmmmcshare your heart with us

Understand our land

mmmmmmmmmmmcwhere we work so hard

To live from our soil

ccmmmmmcccmmcand adore our God

You can find gold of the soul

Music searing through the heart

The Jesuit harp and the rough guitar

And the voice of thick emotion and beauty

You can drink caña all night long

And absorb sweet dreams all the next day

You can watch the sluggish Río Paraguay

Slop and push its tropical way


Riversleep

In such beauty as only the dawn will show

Rhyming its joyous ecstasies

As She streaks Her loveliness across the sky

Pink and red as if they sing,

Thus all jumps beyond the real,

The normal fact and the sleeping feel,

In hoping dream and virulence,

In intensity of blind hopelessness

Driven to craziness by lightness of sun,

Floating as the boat of her sweet brown eyes,

Of her blackjet hair, her wild glance,

This girl who makes you love her so.

Her joyous lips of kissingness

Drip like juices of pilgrimage,

She is your dream, ever returning,

Softly swooping like a jaguar,

Pelting her god-knows-blood upon you,

Do you ever awake from this dream?

Her gorgeous lips they touch your heart,

Her face flashes in wild danger,

She makes the dawn with her luscious smile,

She must have made that moon before,

That cloudy night-sky with the wandering moon

That set all the universe upside down.

Who was she, ever upon the dawn,

The maker of colours in wild sunrise,

Did you ever awake from this dream for long?

Was anything strong enough to destroy its fire?

Deliver yourself of all delusions,

Roam as a mendicant into the sun.


Divine Spark

If the beauteous and divine Spark

Is not dispersed into every human

Heart and Soul, equally, because absolutely full,

It is nothing, and all Religion lies.

But that is not so, only thus

Can the Mystic Truth be understood;

Everyone, All, absolutely

Holds the Spark that to sub-divide

Does not reduce nor take away.


Concepcíon

The roads are criss-crossed

Mud and dust

But very tidy

With wagons and horses

Some wonderful buildings, colonial-style

Sleepy as if from a century ago

Loading a boat with fruit and produce

For another town

Calm, small town

Very sane

I like it here

It 's very quiet

Except for the noises

Of occasional bikes

Or cars,

So extreme their roars!

Settled communities need a stranger,

A wanderer, someone who comes and surprises;

Thus it has always been,

Thus does the Moon refill Her light!

The human mind needs a display

Like fireworks of thought and feeling,

A Symphony of Anton Bruckner,

A Tone Poem of Richard Strauss,

Or, of course, and most supreme,

A Music Drama of Wagner:

The flashing spirits of strange despair,

The effulgent bursts of a riverflow,

The dark suns breaking lights

Of divine spectra and stupendous flames:

Why to flow on the Río Paraguay

Up to Corumbá, slowly amid flights

Of jabirus, macaws, roseate spoonbills,

Fantasies immense of the interior mind,

Playing with the dreams of Objective Nature,

The Pantanal of Carpincho and Mborevi.

O how can I tell

Of the yearning for thou

Grand river with island

Never satisfied

Why I desire

Not the mother but wrongly

The daughter of thou

In deep stupidity

O impossible being

Like an island in a river

Is all I can know,

Never am I full

Deep in emptiness

No belief in God,

I have my Pantheism

Feeling of the Divine

In all Nature and Being

But I hate Religion

There is no God

Sitting as a bearded fool

Dividing Spirit from Matter

Way up in the sky

Making me feel guilty

When life is difficult enough

Without such a fatuous fantasm

And why did He create

Everything so crazily

Human beings with such tendencies

Just so to say

You have Free Will, so all is your fault.

Any God of that kind

Would be a sadist

Creating such possibility of pain

Providing a Hell for those who fail

His lousy obstacles

Burning them in all Eternity

Because He created them thus

I would hate such a God

If He dared to exist

Which He doesn't

When the body dies

So does the spirit

And all re-enters the Cosmic Whole

Whatever that may mean.

There is some transcendent Beauty

Some transcendent Spirit of Goodness

A feeling, a force, beyond understanding

In the Universe, a Divinity of Existence,

But not a God, or gods, or if there are

I hate them all, and I would prefer to suffer

In their hells, rather than try to find

Acceptance in their rottenness.

Only in your sweet arms

That I do not have now

Is bliss, but then I know

How Paradise was born.

As a child, I believed in God,

But then I learnt, when so deserted,

What an evil mirage it all was,

Dancing menacing tortures for a lost

Teenager, fuelled by nasty men

With power to poison me.

Therefore I wage war

Against all full-scale ideologies

That seek to impose upon the naive

What their imposers wish to see.

Just think for yourself, as Nietszche said,

Be a human being, lost and alone,

Walking high upon the clouds

Until all crashes you down

And accept, after your trivial moment

Bouncing in this sea of chaos,

That you will die, and disappear.

But hold your dignity, and believe

That what you do for what is good

Is real, because you know

In your own being, that it is,

And stuff all the garbage that flies around,

Trust only in yourself.

O gut it to your deep

Spasm beyond thought.

Does the beat continue?

To hell if it does not

Just die, and float away

Who cares, not even the frogs

That bark upon a drooping quagmire

Haggling with the fires,

Spit a poodle into the grange,

They are goofed up to their brains.

Because the hogs eat the spleens

Of tadpoles when they enter their teens

Jookies quip and splod a doop

Before the rain pooves a poop

And many a croupe plays its sting

Amid the various drowning rings

When hoopla is not more a grog

And none breathes, not even Bad Dog.

White splash free dog

Dog fish drip

Spat! Spit

I feel so bad

Sorry to everyone

Clocked like a crock to the ultimate dock

I spoop, a coglit drooper in stang

O let’s die, disperse

Into the other atoms

Half in love with Death

Or that Nightingale on Hampstead Heath

Leave regrets behind

And all inadequacies

All the mistakes of stalking on this earth

If there could be an Immaculate Conception

Why not an Immaculate Death?

Spat!

Not a splat is a flshcrook true!

Here I decline

And brig into brew

There is always a boogie in a glop-filled sphere

There perhaps I can dream anew

I cannot understand

Why he hated me so

From the moment of my unwilled birth

Plucked from a dark womb,

But it was my joy, too

To be so foreign to every sky

Never was I a pea in a pod

And that is something wonderful

Because you view the dawn in a special way

When you should never have been there at all

Those streaking drunken colours are pure

Madness, exploding beyond all normality

I have always heard those streams

Like holiness of mystic dreams

Whether I should or not, unsure

I sink like gold into every beauty

As my soul is sometimes on hard fire

Like a meteorite bursting through the sky,

I know not why, nor how, nor for what,

But I never sleep, but for these dreams.

When the world hurts too much,

I must learn to float away,

Why I am so, I do not know,

Perhaps it was all because I strayed.

But, from what, I cannot see

Clearly; that perfect path

Seems absurd in light of barbed

Wires that spread so totally.

In flayed flesh at times the stars

Shine cruelly upon the stones,

The deadening rocks that scream in flames,

The burrs of the desert, surrounding cactuses,

Spiking the air in desperate yearnings,

Bite with despairing mouths into the empty sky,

Where nothing lives, only cold winds fly.

Better not be born, throw your heart

In black pieces to the wolves who howl,

The river sucks all who sing

And all my foolish cells droop.


If You Cannot See The Sun

If you cannot see the sun

If you cannot taste her beauty

The girl whose voice is rich as stars

Her beauty sharp as blood-red roses

Her lips soft and berry-ripe

Her eyes round like sad kisses

Juice of fruit squeezing softly

Warm wet deliciousness

I never asked if I should live

I never asked if you should live

I never asked you or I to live

As I try to kiss the Moon

As your lips seem to be the Moon

And your eyes enter Her eternity

And your soft silk envelops everything

That was what I found it was

So different from all they had told me

I didn 't love the boxes and stairs

I loved her hair and her perfume

And I loved the sun, the moon, and stars,

And translucent water in a pool,

And music drifting through the air

Like coloured ripples in visible ether

I did not love the square staircase

Nor the trumpet-lies nor guns


Pantanal

In my deep rich soul

All nature is singing

In harmony through me

Feeling its own ecstasy

I hear it sing

It is happy and wonderful

The sky and water smile

In their blue infinity

The love

mmmmcof the moon

That ripples

mmcmcmmon the water

Is like stars in veneration

mmmmmmmmmmcmmmand deep solemnity

Crazy In Corumbá

Zog. Hatted a gnat-fish,

But died. Skood a splight,

Chiggle was a capybara,

Jeg Spooch hogged the fleen.

All ended. Bag skat a zebra,

Jog dopped eleven frog,

Water beet a doppel spang,

Hoogly fosh a kroot.

But now he was in love.

Before, with Anne it had been simply lust

In a summer's hay-field,

Older woman and all that.

Now the greatest playwright ever to be

Was going to have to marry her;

Not the lovely girl he had sunk into joyous

Miraculous love with, at the tender age

Of only eighteen. There was the laboratory

Of life and passion for our Will.

Then came MacBeth and Hamlet

And Juliet and Ophelia.

And all the little ducks they came and jumped into the fire

As squiggled fears and Brabazons knocked toads into the mire.

There was one ancient Mystery who cooed up to the sky

But stopped because the Cosmos was condensed into a fly.

The green of the Pantanal

Sublimely surrounds Corumbá

As the heat of the day

And the clear blue of the sky

Surrounds your flesh

And the scents and perfumes

Drown your senses

Into lovely stupidity

And caipirinha flows

Down your soft throat

In the drenched nights happily

Extinguishing anxiety

And you dream

In lemon-flowers and coloured

Parakeets, toucans flapping

Near swifts and vultures

Of violent colours

In deep surprise


New Miracle

And after the pain comes joy,

After the doubt, comes love,

Like the feelings stirred by music -

The lyre of the soul moved by the wind;

All is aroused as a well of wonder,

Miracle of the sun and moon.


Spoot

His cheerfulness bore the cost

Of a profound fatalism,

Wrote Alfred Einstein, in his book

Mozart. His Character, His Work.

Thus it is, I think now,

For the best of human beings in the world,

As life cannot satisfy many,

It is too hard, too cruel

For anything but stoical fatalism.

But to accept that without resentment,

Without self-pity or anger!

That is the great secret, and many know it

In South America. They smile and enjoy

What there is. Suffer no illusions

About miracles changing everything

In their lives. Just live.

As if I had fallen into a sea of honey

Where you did not need even to swim

To keep afloat. Love so soft

Penetrating your being in stars of flight,

Perfumes of paradise entering your skin,

Beautiful breezes into your soul.

Now Bosh, he thought everyone loved

His style: "We are all Americans now!"

But some did not agree, they felt

They were from Brazil, or Paraguay,

Or Singapore, or Timbuktu;

So when he wagged his lovely finger

They did not wish to suck it;

But nevertheless he egged on a world

That did not feel he was a giant,

And others did not like at all

The way he quickly got-out-of-there,

And sent his jets with all his millions

To drop bombs on children afar.

But Bosh was such a brave young man

He threw a baseball ball,

And that he thought, was all he needed

To do, to gather fame.

He jerked his arm, and tossed the ball,

So valiently he did it,

All the children in Palestine

Adored to see him do it!

He was so brave, he cocked a snook

At Binny Lad, his friend,

And then they danced right by a canyon,

But noone knows yet if they fell

Plungingly into the abyss:

We all still wait and pray!


Cycles Of Mind And Nature

From agony to anger to stupidity to pain

From weakness to revenge to desperation to calm

And again from idiocy to rage to passion to calm

And from understanding to exhaustion to peace and calm

Floods squawking rain rise

The river spreads over flood-plains

Fish disperse, heat burns

Sweat then goes down, wind

Cools and night hurts

River subsides sluggish nothings

Storks pook into spivelling pools

Eat swimming meals


Meditation

If there can be any happiness

It is often because not much happens.

Peacefulness of mind, not achievement -

The rushing around to chase ephemera

Of one's own tail - allows a little calm.

Then you can enjoy the moon

And watch a beautiful grasshopper.

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a raunchland publication 2002

text © Tim Cloudsley 2002

images © Mary Johnstone 2002